So what did I do this weekend?

Well, first-up was Cropredy Folk Festival – involving getting up at 0600, driving about 70 miles northwards to Banbury and driving my shiny new car around several wet, muddy fields until I convinced myself that it would be too foolish and too much hassle to attempt to camp at the site overnight – Hence I would have to suffer spending the day sober.

This is a deeply upsetting experience when the festival atmosphere comprises at least 50% real ale.

Anyway – twenty thousand people spread themselves over a handful of farmers’ fields, with all the mess and mud that this entails. I shall spare you the gory details about turfing my various friends out of their tents (myself having arrived on the last of three days worth of concert) — plus the chatting with old friends whom I see too infrequently, the mud, the knackered people with hangovers, the mud, the lovely people who expended great effort in trying to get me to drink and stay overnight, the mud…

…actually, from what I gathered, the mud was not as bad as it had been three years ago, but it still caked my car and my boots. Also, everyone who was there for the previous day had got drenched in pissing rain, so were a little more bedraggled than normal.

My friend steve has pictures at: [www.earth.ox.ac.uk] …which should impart some of the flavour.

The bands were almost incidental, but for completeness included Eddi Reader and Richard Thompson and the usual saturday-night mixup of Fairport Convention and friends. They provided a pleasant aural backdrop to the “people experience” though I suspect that — how can i put this? maybe: i feel that the latter is getting more subtle and fragmentary as my friends accrue more history (and emotional baggage) to carry around with them?

Or perhaps It’s easier and more pleasant to deal with large quantities of friends en-masse, if you/they tend towards maintaining simple, easy-to-understand relationships.

Anyway: the clock rolled-around to midnight, we made our goodbyes, hugs and occasionally kisses, 98% of the attendees headed back to the mud and I headed for the carpark.

Forty minutes later and I was in the Rollright Stones Circle – [www.rollrightstones.co.uk] – and wound-up my evening sitting in the middle of a 4000-year-old stone circle until 0300h, watching meteors, sipping booze, and chatting by firelight with my friend Jane, plus a merry band of pagans who occupy their spare hours by doing security work for various outdoor events.

The latter are an excellent bunch with some wild stories to tell, a great respect for people – so long as respect is demonstrated in turn – and so it was the next day that I eventually ended-up co-opted as an honourary member of their team, and did traffic duty with them.

Perhaps security people in all fields, understand each other at some level?

Anyway – on sunday was the Terry Pratchett play Lords and Ladies – hence the need for additional security; I helped with shuttling plain-old tourists on/offsite whilst the play preparations were going on, and all manner of stuff.

We even started doing experiments on the road-traffic going past, walking out into the road in yellow and orange high-visibility jackets and seeing which was the more effective at slowing-down speeding drivers. (yellow jackets work best)

Watching the play was exciting, as was getting to meet all kinds of new people, plus being challenged to make new friends – the only person there whom I actually knew was Jane, although a couple of (they might say: “former”) friends who drove all the way from Malvern did turn up and did a volte-face at the gate, when they saw me there.

Some people have the oddest priorities in life.

We wrapped-up at midnight (again; by this time I felt rather rank) and I gave the Props Designer a lift back to her home in Reading. Ibuprofen, food, bubble-bath (Ah!) and bed. Laundry and car-wash tonight.

One hell of a weekend. Oh, and did I mention I will probably be doing much of it all-over again next weekend? 😎